Saturday, Jan. 19, 1918
Like people throughout the eastern U.S., many Saratoga County residents are angry at the federal government’s forced five-day shutdown of factories east of the Mississippi.
“Look at the injustice to the working people!” a writer signed “J.X.” protests in The Saratogian’s “People’s Forum” column, “it is a safe bet that there are several hundred people in the factories in this county that live so from hand to mouth that they need this week’s wages to buy next week’s coal and food. How are they to get along?”
Federal fuel administrator Henry Garfield ordered the shutdown so limited coal resources could be diverted to ships in Atlantic ports, and to clear eastern railroads for freight trains bound for those ports. After the fiveday shutdown expires, most businesses will have to close on the next nine Mondays to continue saving fuel for the U.S. war effort.
In a sop to public opinion, Garfield revises one detail of his order today, permitting theaters to open on the Monday “holidays” but requiring them to close on the following Tuesdays.
“Is this the long expected and usual Democratic blunder that the Kaiser has been waiting for?” J.X. asks, “Surely nothing has been done to equal this to create discussion and dissatisfaction in our country.” The order “shows what a well meaning, feeble minded damphool can do to help the Kaiser.”
When does anger at government war policy become seditious? Harry Page of Schenectady may not like the answer.
It’s unclear what provoked Page’s tirade on a trolley traveling from Saratoga Springs to Ballston Spa this afternoon, but Saratoga County sheriff William J. Dodge, riding in the same car, doesn’t like what he hears.
Dodge hears Page “talking in loud tones, expressing his opinion of the government in general in no complimentary terms, and having a decided pro-German flavor to his conversation, apparently addressed to the people in the rear,” The Saratogian reports. Page is not quoted directly in the report.
“Sheriff Dodge ordered him peremptorily to stop and also told him to get off at Ballston and he would investigate him,” the report continues. Page “immediately cooled off when he found he was ‘in wrong,’ and protested that he was an American and did not mean to be disloyal.
“Finally the county officer decided to let him go on to Schenectady and ordered the conductor not to allow the man off the car until an officer got there in the city. He then telephoned from [Ballston Spa] to the sheriff of Schenectady county to investigate the man and he agreed to do so.”